Aging Avant-Garde

[Larry Kart]

Straight, simple question - is there some book out there that can fill in the last 40 years of Chicago avant for me?

MG

Not yet. From what I've seen of it, George Lewis's forthcoming tome on the AACM will be chewy in spots but often brilliant and as close to comprehensive as could be possible. The non-AACM Chicago AG scene has not found its Boswell (don't look at me -- I couldn't get past the Vandermark barrier, for one thing), nor has it been continuous, as far as I know, in the way the AACM has been since its inception. Probably the key figure of continuity there was, as Chuck pointed out on that thread from 2005 I linked to, the late Hal Russell. (Chuck recorded Russell as well as Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Leo Smith et al.) Also, when I say the "non-AACM Chicago AG scene," I don't mean to suggest that there's any sense of opposition at work here; in fact, there's a good deal of friendly, open-eared contact, sharing of bandstands, interactions among players, etc.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

MG-- i don't think Sista's really gets that much money at all-- those 'gets funding' citations are very deceptive in that regard.

Kay.

reading

Ahmed Abdullah's website

is perhaps instructive.

Yes, very. Thanks. AA can write really nice stuff. I could feeel Ascension again, as I read it.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Straight, simple question - is there some book out there that can fill in the last 40 years of Chicago avant for me?

MG

Not yet. From what I've seen of it, George Lewis's forthcoming tome on the AACM will be chewy in spots but often brilliant and as close to comprehensive as could be possible. The non-AACM Chicago AG scene has not found its Boswell (don't look at me -- I couldn't get past the Vandermark barrier, for one thing), nor has it been continuous, as far as I know, in the way the AACM has been since its inception. Probably the key figure of continuity there was, as Chuck pointed out on that thread from 2005 I linked to, the late Hal Russell. (Chuck recorded Russell as well as Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Leo Smith et al.) Also, when I say the "non-AACM Chicago AG scene," I don't mean to suggest that there's any sense of opposition at work here; in fact, there's a good deal of friendly, open-eared contact, sharing of bandstands, interactions among players, etc.

Ok, thanks. I'll do what I always do then - thrash around a bit and see what turns up.

MG

[RDK]

Fuck Manhattan. Know how much a-g we get here in L.A.? Last time (only time i recall) Ornette played in L.A. was at the frakin' Disney concert hall. Now a-g isn't often my cuppa, but I'd at least like the chance every once in a while....

[Chuck Nessa]

Fuck Manhattan. Know how much a-g we get here in L.A.? Last time (only time i recall) Ornette played in L.A. was at the frakin' Disney concert hall. Now a-g isn't often my cuppa, but I'd at least like the chance every once in a while....

Might I suggest if "a-g isn't often my cuppa" you would miss the news.

[Chuck Nessa]

I am really disturbed by the direction of this thread.

The future of "the music" and how it develops is a huge question for me. If the answer is posts above, we be gone.

Music should be a living thing, not parasites mining the past for a "style" on which to build a career. That shit don't work anyway.

[Larry Kart]

I am really disturbed by the direction of this thread.

The future of "the music" and how it develops is a huge question for me. If the answer is posts above, we be gone.

Music should be a living thing, not parasites mining the past for a "style" on which to build a career. That shit don't work anyway.

Hope my post wasn't one of those, but just in case, none of the players I mentioned there seems to me to be a parasite "mining the past for a 'style' on which to build a career." I don't like that shit either, agree that it doesn't work anyway, and don't think I'm likely to be fooled. (If I am self-deluded here, our friend John L. is in the same boat on several of these guys FWIW.)

[JSngry]

If I read "Af-Am" one more time, I'm going to puke. Nothing personal, but..... no. Just one of those things.

If we want to look backwards to look forwards in a non-necrophilliac kind of way, it seems to me that all great music comes out of a heritage of ritual, including dance. To that end, I'd suggest that the big disconnect of our times is between the "musically intellegent" community & the dance music world. The former is (mostly) too intellectually self-congratulatory to lower itself to the realm of something as common as dance, and the latter has (mostly) been barracaded from musical depth/breadth by a combination of their own myopic/claustrophobic life vision & the self-interests of an industry that needs to discourage true escape in order to keep selling the illusion of it.

This needs to change if humanity is going to remain human. People who hate dancing, especially "creative musicians" are dangerous. And so are people who would rather dance than think. You gotta, absolutely must gotta, do both. In some way.

However, there are pockets of really creative & vital dance music being made today, the very best of it more creative and vital that all but a thimble full of the "jazz" that's getting made. It still "suffers" from certain (and only certain) "musical limitations", but anybody who thinks that there's not room for such a thing in that music is mistaken. I can feel it, and I can almost hear it. I don't I have the generational/lifestyle "connection" to actually do it, what with me having lived, married, bred, and aged in the Jazz Cave all these years. But surely the blood that can do it is out there.

[Chuck Nessa]

However, there are pockets of really creative & vital dance music being made today, the very best of it more creative and vital that all but a thimble full of the "jazz" that's getting made.

Pockets are my worst fear. That means no direction ahead (as demonstrated for a while).

[Chuck Nessa]

(wanders in from outside)

Watcha all talkin' bout here?

French lit.

[JSngry]

However, there are pockets of really creative & vital dance music being made today, the very best of it more creative and vital that all but a thimble full of the "jazz" that's getting made.

Pockets are my worst fear. That means no direction ahead (as demonstrated for a while).

I hear ya', but I also wonder how much of the pocket-ism is real & how much of it is caused by self-induced & self-sustaining illusions.

Too many goddamn shackles...

[Chuck Nessa]

I hear ya', but I also wonder how much of the pocket-ism is real & how much of it is caused by self-induced & self-sustaining illusions.

Too many goddamn shackles...

Self imposed I fear.

[Chuck Nessa]

I'm getting dizzy again.

[JSngry]

I hear ya', but I also wonder how much of the pocket-ism is real & how much of it is caused by self-induced & self-sustaining illusions.

Too many goddamn shackles...

Self imposed I fear.

Yep. On all sides.

[Chuck Nessa]

Jim, you deleted a post explaining my dizz message.

[JSngry]

My bad. Sorry.

[Larry Kart]

If I read "Af-Am" one more time, I'm going to puke.

Clem -- I've listened over and over to a fair amount of Saariaho and Lindberg, in the hope that ... but, no. Seems to me that in the former there's almost no "there" there, and that in the latter one moves, over time, from a near-programmatic ugliness (like the score for a movie about a huge nasty alien space ship, e.g. the aptly titled "Engine") to candy sweetness (e.g. the Clarinet Concerto -- not a bad ear there, but SO sweet). I've got my money on Helmut Lachenmann, Pascal Dusapin, Salvatore Sciarrino, and a few others.

[Larry Kart]

Jim -- In case that wasn't clear, that's my on the thought of puking at "Af-Am." Sorry if that made you do it.

[Larry Kart]

Whew. Found my copy of that fine Jason Ajemian disc:

http://www.luckykitchen.com/spark2/lk025.html

Don't know if it's still available. The Jazz Record Mart might have a few copies left.

Here Ajemian's My Space site, if you want to ask him directly:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea...iendid=50309593

[ghost of miles]

If we want to look backwards to look forwards in a non-necrophilliac kind of way, it seems to me that all great music comes out of a heritage of ritual, including dance. To that end, I'd suggest that the big disconnect of our times is between the "musically intellegent" community & the dance music world. The former is (mostly) too intellectually self-congratulatory to lower itself to the realm of something as common as dance, and the latter has (mostly) been barracaded from musical depth/breadth by a combination of their own myopic/claustrophobic life vision & the self-interests of an industry that needs to discourage true escape in order to keep selling the illusion of it.

This needs to change if humanity is going to remain human. People who hate dancing, especially "creative musicians" are dangerous. And so are people who would rather dance than think. You gotta, absolutely must gotta, do both. In some way.

Jim,

Isn't this the schism that Ellison et al identify as emerging in the mid-1940s with bop? (Pace Mr. Jones/Baraka's assertion--not without validity--that bop could be danced to--but I'm interested to see you putting forth a modern variant of this line of thought.)

Rhythm's at the heart of nearly every musical revolution, but I'm no longer sure it's going to save the world.

Edited October 24, 2006 by ghost of miles

[Larry Kart]

LK! Where'd you pull Dusapin out of? That's pretty good. I suggest going back to Saariaho, she's the Finnish lady Debussy meets Sibelius. Lindberg I do share reservations but he's real & ingratiaing in complexity. I'm thinking of you can dig on Elliott Carter, Lindberg's next. Rautavaara I was cool too for a while, all the damn angels for one, but now I am convinced he's a genius.

Pulling something as wildly obscure as James Broughton "True & False Unicorn" out as a text ain't the sign of a lightweight. Sciarrino & Lachenmann are good but different bags-- have you heard the Helmit "opera" Das Madchen... ? Peter Eotvos, an excellent composer, does NOT conduct, but elsewhere he does.

everybody is a star * including clementine

Don't recall when and how Dusapin crossed my path, but I like most everything I've heard. Debussy meets Sibelius is what Saariaho's Oltra Mar is like, but we've already got Debussy and Sibelius. Also, some of her wave music there seems close to movie wave music. I've yet to detect much of a language sense in Lindberg's grimmer stuff, and I've tried and tried. (Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto does have a language sense, but so does Rhapsody In Blue.) Carter's no problem for me, if it's a good performance and I pay attention. That recent Bridge disc with the piano and chamber orchestra work Carter wrote for Nicholas Hodges is a gem. If you like Rautavaara -- I admit backing off quick from my only attempt to sample -- have you tried Tviett?

[RDK]

Would I be out of line - or just plain dumb - to ask just what is considered the avante-garde these days... and perhaps more importantly: why is it considered so?

[Lazaro Vega]

Er, the West Michigan lure tossed in the cement waters has bounced into my boat, I suppose, and reflecting off the surface of the polished mahogany we see that Patrick Brennan's "Sonic Openings Under Pressure" played Mexicans San Frontieres on South Division Avenue in Grand Rapids this Saturday. Thriving? Well, for the people who were there...Grand Rapids has developed a row of new studio apartments on South Division designed for artists -- I'm sorry I can't recall the corporate group that put this together right now...

West Michigan can be a tour stop. It isn't a place where creative music is growing, but a place where it may, if the stars line up, find some nourishment. Just a week or so ago the 10th Annual Edge Fest was held at Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor. Various folks in Grand Rapids try to get bands that are up for Edge Fest to do a run out. It's just that the money sucks right now. I tried to get The Claudia Quintet on the radio here at the beginning of the month but the economics didn't work out for it. Here's hoping Henry Grimes returns at the beginning of December. Would LOVE to have him with Fred Anderson. That would be only on the radio, live from our studios. Don't have time to raise a house or deal with concert economics anymore.

Somethings have happened here, though. I mean Fred Anderson played Detroit in 1966 with Jarman and after than his only returns to Michigan have been to Grand Rapids (1995 with Vandermark and 2001 with Roscoe Mitchell's Quintet featuring Craig Taborn). Living here I take Michigan as a region as opposed to one single community who's going to carry all the water. The majority of activity is around Ann Arbor. There's a guy down in Kalamazoo who regularly puts on Chicagoans and their European allies at The Kraftbrau Brewery. And Mount Pleasent has had it's moments, too, with Mike Johnston, a musician, making a go.

Since the birth of my children it's all about radio concerts for me. For a good 15 years before their arrival the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids allowed me to produce some adventuresome music on nearly a monthly basis during the season. Whether the musicians were old or young didn't matter as much as what they had to say. Roscoe, Fred, Lacy, Bowie, Vinny Golia, Rova, Lisle Ellis, Adam Rudolph, Billy Bang, Pharoah, even Lee Konitz. Thing is if you want to do something in places like this you don't have to stand in line behind anyone -- just go out and make it happen. The trouble now, though, after 9-11, the audience went back down to early 1980's levels. Where once you could work and pull in 150 to even 300 people it went back down to 50 and breaking 100 unless it was just the right venue on just the right weekend and your press was all perfect from 3 months out it just wasn't going to happen anymore. Not in a concert situation. So the fall back position is the 100,000 watt radio station and the 4,000 or so listeners in their vitual concert hall (and the handful of people who listen on the web).

Maybe Mexicans San Frontieres and other artist driven venues will have more success now in these here parts, VanderGrandRapidsMa-ly yours, O'vega.

[AllenLowe]

I'm a little late to this party, and out of my depth in terms of some of the music Larry and Clem are talking about - I have, however, been suffering from listener fatigue for some time; the trick for me is to differentiate between what is my problem and what is the problem for contemporary musicians - but I have been thinking about this a lot and want to be so bold as to post a section of what used to be the liner notes to a CD I have coming out, hopefeully in January - a lot of this did not make the cut for space reasons, but it does reflect my current thoughts, for better or for worse:

"As I listen these days to a lot of contemporary music (thinking, among other things, of Public Radio’s World Café) I am struck by how bad so much of the writing is – lyrically we seem, on the neo-folk-rock/indy rock side, to be stuck (in the way of old 1930s and 1940s social-realist novelists), with a kind of outdated, dusty, realism. I hear in this music a surplus of badly written, false-sounding Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylanisms and other tired folkie phrases, likely artifacts of the rise of a post-literate generation. When musicians who write (and who live, from a literary standpoint, in an a-historic vacuum) only listen to other musicians who write, it tends to make the product sound in-grown and narrow. It reminds me of my theater/drama school days: than (and now) a lot of talented writers had primarily television and melodramatic films as their frame of reference, and their writing – intelligent, fluent, sharp, but shallow – showed this (I see the same general problem in much of today’s independent film). Maybe I am a dinosaur here, but I wish new writers had more of a sense of language and spoken rhythm, and it wouldn’t hurt them to read Ezra Pound and George Buchner. Just as it wouldn’t hurt latter day cineastes to include Bresson and Antonioni in their Tarantino-saturated play lists or as supplements to the graphic novels that line their shelves.

From an instrumental standpoint, a lot of the alt/music players that I hear have neglected to really learn much in the way of new music/creative improvised musical techniques, of extemporaneous playing and the creative use of noise. It’s too easy these days to send massively sustained notes laden with fake digital feedback lapping against the studio walls, to wail in a synthesized electronic way, to mistake modernist or post-modernist gesture, gimmick and mannerism for true style (as in a lot Sonic Youth or all of Beck). Too much of what I hear is really the same old/same old, dressed up with contemporary references. The resulting creative dilemma is not, of course, confined to the pop and rock field, as jazz musicians and other improviser/composers also struggle, with very mixed results, to stay creative. For this side of the music, process has come to dominate in a way that merely reinforces the received clichés of free improvisation, much like 1960s hippies and hipsters, in seeking new ways of being and behaving, ended up by defining the parameters of a new kind of conformism. The result, in the sphere of sonic experimentation, is a generation of great musical theorists (see the magazine The Wire, in particular, and many of the groups featured in the jazz magazine Signal to Noise) who can talk the talk but who are MUCH stronger on sonic theory than practice. They do come up with great titles and philosophical parallels, but the music invariably disappoints. Formalism has indeed run amuck.

It is as though some performers have decided that the idea is sufficient, that execution and artistic rigor are secondary considerations (when considered at all). The result is the persistent failure of performers/creators to differentiate mannerism from style, gimmick from idea. Eric Bentley pointed out long ago, in the realm of theater, that the author of a play was not just a flailing typist seeking pure emotional expression but a thinker, too, an intervening intellectual force. Most significantly, Bentley never tried, in theatrical terms, to isolate intellectual content from the emotional deliverance of the work. So should it be with music: intellect and emotion, like form and content, are aspects of the same consciousness, and any attempt to separate or divide them either degrades the work or leads to artistic and intellectual hollowness (anticipating, as I am, a counter-argument that I am missing the emotional or emotive aspect of some contemporary work). This does not have to be a fundamentally conservative concept, as it applies, in one way or another, to virtually every successful modernist or avant garde movement of the last 100 years.

...I was recently reading Kyle Gann’s very smart collection of critical pieces on contemporary/classical/new music. Though I’m not well versed in most of the music he was covering, I was struck by a fairly regular reiteration, by musicians of that other school (other, that is, than American pop/vernacular/blues/jazz etc), of the idea of the necessity of finding, in musical terms, a truly American voice. I have heard and read this before, as it was debated by the American “classical” avant garde even before World War II. And though I admire a great deal of the music produced by such musicians, I am always somewhat bewildered by the mystification of the concept of an American “sound.” This is, after all, something that “unsophisticated,” semi and illiterate, uneducated, enslaved and indentured Black and White rural Americans began to devise and develop some 300 years ago. Which is not to say that people like Conlon Nancarrow do not have something important to tell us musically, only that, when it comes to Americanism in sound, they live in a musically gated community.

Within that community certain kinds of minimalist, neo-vernacular gestures seem to have arisen as a response to America-in-song, and I appreciate some of them but also find a lot of them to be mired in by-now clichéd, glib concepts of rhythmic repetition. Apparently some composers view such repetition as representing an accurate musical analog to “modern” concepts like the “factory/machine age” (sic), or as replicating vernacular ideas of musical rhythm, sonority, and space. To me, however, this represents not “real” life but a somewhat delusional and out-of-date liberal presumption about working-class music, working-class life and the banality of working-class and plain old American day-to-day work. And it tends, also, to come from people who have not really had to do much of that work (eg, from composer Annie Gosfield’s web site, describing a recording she’s made: “a journey through shifting industrial environments… uses junk percussion, lush sonorities, odd drones, twangy guitars, and driving rhythms to suggest a cacophonous industrial din accompanied by the crashes and bangs of heavy machinery.” Seems she had a residency somewhere in Germany, though I am presuming she meant to connect with working people throughout the world, particular those in Amerika, who, after all, when it comes to matters of taste, have nothing to lose but their chain-link fences. And let’s not forget Laurie Anderson, who tells us that, to get back in touch with America, she went to work for a while at a McDonald’s. Maybe Lou needs to work more).

But than again, there’s also the composer Harry Partch, who, bemoaning the classically layered harmonies and academic-complexities which have descended in Western music from Bach, wrote: “The ancient Greek and Chinese conception – as old as history - that music is poetry, has deteriorated…even when words are used they are merely a vehicle for tones. The voice is just another violin or another cello… with this metamorphosis…the ancient conception…was obscured, left to folk peoples – sailors, soldiers, gypsies…troubadours, Meistersingers, the Japanese Noh and kabuki, the folk music of England and our own southern mountains, the pure Negro spiritual (not ‘symphonized’) - hearers are transported not by mass but subtlety…the true music of the individual.”

Which is a nice, and decidedly non-anti-intellectual, antidote to not only certain kinds of musical elitism but also to their equally false, social-realist, popular front opposites. Partch is thinking of a real and actual people’s music, of the kind that reflects a life lived, not along the jaded lines of “been there, done that,” but rather in the realm of thought, experience, ideas, and imagination. And, as Partch points out, the aesthetic ideal he is proposing has already been realized by hillbillies and bluesmen and others in touch with American thought and speech. In his prophetic, brilliantly prescient view (he wrote the above in 1941) anything and everything are ripe for musical picking (though I will say that even Partch seems to have that peculiar blind spot for the vernacular which seems to be most characteristic of academics; his anti-dance-band pronouncements – he found such things to be commercial corruptions of African and other exotic sources – reflect not only the excessive zeal of the newly converted but also, ironically, an academic-like misunderstanding of the complicated communal and socio-commercial functions of jazz and other forms of vernacular-sourced performance. Likely as a result, his own works, fascinating twists on conventional tonality played on self-made and eccentrically tuned instruments, show an odd lack of awareness that he was, in actuality, trying to reinvent the wheel: the sound of his own tunings are less interesting than the off-kilter tonality of the down home country players from whom he might have more efficiently and directly learned to apply the essence of African and Southern tonalities. If he had spent some real time listening to that rural and local music he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble, as the theoretical basis for a non-tonal – or pre-tonal as Larry Kart calls it - approach to American music had already been well established).

Partch, for all that, was in no way guilty of stylistic dilettantism, an unfortunate contemporary outgrowth of some current musical schools, like new psychedilia/drone/world music/sonics. Though I tend to disagree with Wynton Marsalis on nearly everything, I understand his skepticism about World music and it’s glib absorption by contemporary musicians; such gestures are, in my experience, rarely earned by the quality or depth of music produced. So it is, as well, with much of the new freak-folk-psychedelic movement (which, despite this, has real possibilities, I think) and with some other contemporary musically avant and roots niches. One gets the feeling that few who produce such things have really listened to and absorbed the music of the “old weird America” for which they advocate, to either the black and white hillbillies who recorded so prolifically in the 1920 or to the free jazzers who sprouted so quickly in the 1960s. They seem instead to have picked up the music at second and third hand. In musical terms this does not necessarily matter or even have to matter, though there are often definite and significant musical side-effects. And what is most irritating is the way archaic styles and stylists are cited, in publications like Signal to Noise and The Wire, with so little real understanding, like names dropped in a post-modernist gossip column.

...Reading back through these notes, it occurs to me that my complaints about the contemporary music world differ little from criticism made by past generations of critics about contemporary arts, and sound suspiciously like many of the things that the theater and literary critic Richard Gilman was writing about in the 1960s and 1970s (no coincidence, that). As they say, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, the last time as repeater pencil."

Edited October 24, 2006 by AllenLowe

[paul secor]

Have only had time to skim this thread - hope to do a more thorough reading in time.

Just a couple of quick thoughts:

Reading Cadence over the course of a year, I find recordings that might be considered to fall into the category of "avant garde" by artists who range from young to middle aged to old, so it would seem that the musicians are there.

Whether the audience is there is another story. Many of these artists have several CDs out, but I wonder who's listened to them, outside of family, friends, Cadence reviewers, and perhaps a handful of others.

This thread has made me think about my own listening habits. I find myself unwilling to take a chance on unknown artists these days. My listening to and purchasing of new recordings by "avant garde" artists seems to be restricted to artists who are older and who probably can't be considered "avant garde". (Hate that term - which is why I put it in quotes.)

Perhaps what is needed is a new thread recommending younger artists to lead people like myself to them. I find the Funny Rat thread fairly useless for this purpose.